What inspired the story?
I loved working on this project because the publisher let me go where I needed to go to make the book work. And the photographs really tell a story in themselves. They make the text come alive. I wanted to showcase information that isn’t commonly known in a school curriculum. For instance, the fact that the Himalaya mountain range was formed when the Indian continent slammed into the Asian continent. It pushed materials up from the bottom of the ocean. That is why you find fossils of ancient sea creatures on the top of the mountain. I also read historical accounts of the British attempts to climb the mountain starting in the 1920’s. After several Sherpa were swept away in an avalanche the expedition leader, John Hunt, wrote home to say “Thank God, no British were killed.” It was as if the Sherpa were unimportant and expendable. Even the 1953 expedition that lead to Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary reaching the summit, started with the British forcing the Sherpa to sleep in an unheated
